A Compact 77% Fractional Bandwidth CMOS Band-Pass Distributed Amplifier With Mirror-Symmetric Norton Transforms

This paper presents the design of a high fractional-bandwidth millimeter-wave band-pass distributed amplifier (BPDA) implemented in a 40 nm (LP) CMOS process. A high-order load impedance with multiple resonant elements is often used to realize wideband amplifiers. However, these implementations require the use of numerous inductors which occupy a prohibitively large amount of silicon area. A mirror-symmetric Norton transformation technique which reduces inductor component values for a wideband amplifier, allowing an area-efficient layout, is described in this paper. The BPDA consumes 34 mW while providing a power-gain of 7 dB from 24-to-54 GHz with less than 2 dB in-band gain-variation. The BPDA has a measured 77% fractional bandwidth, a +11 dBm in-band IIP3, and an in-band noise-figure less than 6.2 dB, while occupying an area of 0.15 mm².